Those of us who entertain a rigid notion as to what fiction—or reality, for that matter—must be may be of opinion that truth can be noun

Monday, May 23, 2011

Perfect Symmetry

It is oftentimes that I wish we haven’t faces. Why just faces, bodies too. Did I say I wish for so many things, like justice, forbearance and sixth dimension, and so it is not to be marveled if I could not will what I wish into being. You say you can tell apart a face in the crowd. Believe you me, I cannot. I’ve grown too morbid to be able to tell the whole from the sum of its parts.

First it was medicine, then criminology, now it is mortuary. Voyeurism and necrophilia—the temptations of the flesh—all in the beginning surely have crossed this mind. With my renouncing of religion, the unbidden flew screeching out of the window. Now even if a pretty corpse woke up and begged me to fuck it I would either say shut up or scream rape and alert the authority of an aberration you like to call miracle. I’m an intense professional and I’ve sworn knowledge is for cutting and cutting only and times like this touching brings knowledge.

Beauty, like fashion, is a shape-shifting beast. The now corpse once was a girl, and it is mine for the hour. The preliminary is the easy part and that is done with. It takes just a moment like it would for a skillful butcher. The hard part is the analysis – not the medical but the psychic. The brain is a powerful vehicle, especially after its death. You would know it if you were a clairvoyant like me. This gift is a secret I keep to myself. Did I tell you it is painful not just to be God but to be like God? Each time I place my hand over a dead head, it’s like touching the untouchable.

She doesn’t like being told to be submissive, let alone being submissive. Picture this: You’re an adolescent boy and a homo who fancies you forces you to do it. How would you like it? Now picture this: Her father forces her to it, she resists him as much as she could and when he finds out she has a lover, envies him and for days locks her up. You wouldn’t believe me when I say there are so many of us with royal blood running in our veins and we don’t know it. This went way too far when I read in her mind that it was the father who poisoned her and know what the news says: Servant boy did it. Grieving lover must have called her slut. She always doubted he believed her every time she told him about her fiddler dad.

This is her first breakup: 'You’re not handsome enough for me' she says. He says 'You’re not pretty enough for me.' This is what you call making it even. I saw, if only fleetingly, them to be tragically beautiful.

She witnesses her father knocking mother unconscious during a quarrel. Mother calls him a queer, in the process of cussing at each other, after he calls her a whore. Minutes after she comes to, fakes a smile, and serves her dinner. She feels through mother’s aching head, sees her swollen eyes, and thinks she’s insanely beautiful.

She’s a sixth grader and faring poorly in English. Father hits her in the head with a cane, teaches her, and this has been the case for months. 'Your daughter cannot conjugate verbs the right way' he shouts so that mother could hear from the inside. She thinks, sobbingly, she shouldn’t be surprised if she had stroke light years before a healthy human had. Mother checks on daughter standing by the kitchen door and thinks she’s sadly beautiful.

Now after all this, if the servant boy is judged of homicide you shouldn’t be taken aback. Justice is blind, true, and it has a face and a body if you catch my drift. I will not go overboard and tell them that I could see beyond what meets the naked eye. If I do that, I’d be submitting myself to capitalist slavery. Politics, diplomacy, and the burdens that come with it aren’t my cup of tea and are things I abhor. Call me rude and cynic, I couldn’t give a tuppenny toss. I will say I see history repeat itself, that justice has holes in it that are constantly toyed with, and that we are going down the ugly way. I will also say I cannot wait for other dimensions to open up so that we could be free as in truly free.

Symmetry is what I see when I see humankind—the Blakean Fearful Symmetry that’s attributed to the perfect, predatory tiger—kind and unkind at once, constructive and destructive at once. These are some contraries that create the fearful, perfect symmetry. This symmetry has a beauty about it that’s too fleeting, it can never be captured. This is what we are and not one bit less, not one bit more: Beautiful and ugly at once.

Real beauty then is momentary and cannot be photographed or relished. That doesn’t mean we get to keep the crowd (that includes you and me) from selling and buying lies. This will be the case as long as we have faces and bodies and conditioned brains locked tight up in four three dimension.

I'm glad I tumbled upon your blog at least now! Your way of writing is entirely on a different level and I cannot help but appreciate the beauty in your style!! Not every perception is same and for me, its like finding a diamond while collecting the stones :)

Nice! The way I see it, you have this rare ability to sound nearly wrong but not quite. There's something discordant you sow in the readers' minds with each phrase so that they keep searching and searching for that one thing that's just *wrong* in the whole post, but there isn't anything. You just have that rare ability to sound nearly wrong but not quite. :) Although, sometimes the stream-of-consciousness punctuation free delivery makes the reading quite hard. I see that in this post you've cut down on that aspect while still keeping the whimsical flavour that characterizes your other posts, and I like the end result! Good luck with the indiblogger contest.

This jagged discontinuous style is a little hard to keep up with, but the effort is enjoyable!You manage to make much sense inspite of its 'whimsical' character as the previous commentator puts it, and seeing the 'level' of your narrative it is difficult to visualise what must be going on in your mind while you were writing it, since it usually takes much more skill to write than comment.Enjoyable as always, you exhibit fearful consistency with the pen and I am sure you will keep getting better.

Nishkam Razdan You're spot on there. It would take a bit of effort on the part of reader to decipher a psychic narrator's thoughts I believe. It's true what you say about what it takes to write.However, once the text is out it's thrown open to readers of all kinds to make what they will of it, which could be both best and worst, and the writer has no control whatsoever over it except to wish it finds the right readers. To read it rightly is to read impartially. Thanks for reading it right.